You opened an aerial studio. Now what?

You spent years training. You built your skills on silks, on lyra, on straps. You got your certifications. You found a space, installed the rigging, bought the fabric, painted the walls. You opened your doors.

And then the questions started — the ones nobody in your aerial training ever prepared you for.

Nobody teaches you the business part.

What should I charge for a monthly membership? Am I pricing too low and leaving money on the table, or too high and losing students before they even try a class? How many students do I need to break even? What’s a normal cancellation rate — is losing four members this month a problem, or just Tuesday? How much should I be spending on Instagram ads, and is any of it actually working?

If you’ve asked yourself any of these questions and found yourself guessing, you’re not alone. You’re in the majority.

The knowledge gap nobody talks about

The aerial arts community is extraordinarily generous with technical knowledge. There are workshops, certifications, online communities, and experienced teachers willing to share what they know about movement, safety, and artistry. The community has built real infrastructure around the craft.

It has built almost nothing around the business. This isn’t a criticism — it’s simply a reflection of where the industry is. Aerial arts studios are almost entirely independent, owner-operated businesses, most of them founded by practitioners who came to business ownership through passion rather than training.

“There are no major franchises producing public data. There is no trade body publishing annual benchmarks. There is no equivalent of the reports that pilates or yoga studio owners can access when they’re trying to figure out whether their numbers are healthy. ”

What this means in practice is that aerial studio owners are making consequential decisions — about pricing, staffing, marketing spend, membership structure — largely in the dark. They’re comparing notes with other studio owners when they can, trusting their gut when they can’t, and hoping their instincts are right.

Sometimes they are. Sometimes they’re not. And without data, it’s very hard to tell the difference.

What a friend learned opening her studio

A few years ago, someone I train with, a gifted aerialist and instructor, opened her own studio. I watched her navigate decisions that would challenge any experienced entrepreneur: pricing classes competitively without undervaluing her expertise, building a membership model that generated reliable income, figuring out how to attract new students while retaining the ones she had.

She figured it out, through persistence and intelligence and a community of people willing to share what they knew. But it was harder than it needed to be. And so much of the difficulty came down to one thing: there was no baseline. No way to know if her retention rate was good or bad by the standards of studios like hers. No way to know if her acquisition costs were reasonable or whether she was massively overspending on marketing. No way to know, from data, what a healthy aerial studio actually looks like.

That observation is what led to the Aerial Arts Index.

What we’re doing about it

The Aerial Arts Index is conducting the first publicly available benchmarking study focused specifically on aerial arts studios in the US. We’re asking studio owners about the metrics that matter most: membership retention, how long students stay, what it costs to bring in new students, how revenue is structured, what’s working and what isn’t.

Every studio that participates will receive the full findings when published. The goal is to produce something genuinely useful, not a glossy marketing document but real numbers that aerial studio owners can actually use to benchmark their own performance and make better decisions.